She was surprised when I suddenly stood in front of her with the tray. Reinstatement of an old tradition, I said. She sat up. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt that must have been Kitty's. I felt like touching her breasts but I did nothing. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched how she drank the coffee, with small, careful sips, while holding the cup between her slightly trembling fingers.
She didn't like rusks with aniseed sugar, she said. Anyway, you're supposed to eat them only when there's a birth in the family. I just thought it looked festive, all those colourful grains, I said. And since when did she take sugar in her coffee? Not in the last ten years she hadn't.
Absent-mindedness, I said. Sorry. I was doing the crossword and I wasn't paying attention properly. So you didn't come back to bed at all? No, I said. Once I start doing the crossword. .
I used to be very quick at these things, but last night at the kitchen table nothing would go right. Another word for — another word for — I couldn't think of anything.
There's been something wrong with my thinking recently. Or could it be that my English is at fault? Since my retirement I am at home with Vera practically all day and speak almost nothing but Dutch.
A few times I filled in the wrong word. Deliberately. So as not to do what the puzzle wanted of me. It gave me a brief moment of relief. And I drew a moustache under the Pope's nose, almost without thinking about it, the way I used to scribble matchstick men in the margin of my note pad when taking minutes at meetings. Doodles.
I screwed up the paper with the puzzle and stuffed it right down to the bottom of the garbage can. Vera would no doubt take those wrong words in bad part. (As long as I do not know what exactly is the matter, I must keep all this to myself.)
Our house has shiny stained wooden floors with a rug here and there. You need only go over it with a soft broom and all is clean. Yet the house gets a bit dirtier every year. In corners and grooves burnt-out matches and hard, withered berries and crumbs accumulate. Vera does not seem to notice. Maybe my eyes are better than hers.
Because she is wearing her slippers I cannot hear her walking about now, but otherwise all day long we know of each other's whereabouts in the house. And Robert's, of course, with his sharply tapping claws.
The house no longer creaks, the wind died down last night. Snow is falling again. The thermometer reads exactly zero degrees centigrade.
Vera is wearing her wine-red corduroy jacket and jeans. She has adapted somewhat to the American style of dress. In this country an older person must, at least as regards clothes, look like a twenty-year-old. I myself stick to the English suits from Dodgson's in Boston. Charcoal grey with a thin stripe. I don't mind if people can tell I don't come from here.
'I'm going out for a little walk with Robert,' I say. 'When I come back I'll get some wood for the fire.'
'Don't forget to put your scarf on,' she says, leaning on the broom. Before going out into the hall to put on my coat I kiss her gently on her left cheek.
'You might have shaved,' she says, tapping my cheek disapprovingly with a gleamingly lacquered nail.
'Do you know what it is?' I say when I shuffle down snow-covered Field Road with Robert. 'It all starts with great, confused feelings.'
Later you remember only a kind of fever, a glow from within, which made everything special, the most ordinary things that you walked past together and looked at and talked about with her. A barn, a notice board, a flock of starlings flying up from a field. You felt a longing to absorb everything she looked at, to forget nothing, not one moment of this world that had suddenly become her world: cool, bright, unfathomable.
You should never go back to places you used to know. If you do, you destroy that glow, the core of your memories, like Pop, who, old as he was, took the car after Mama's death and went back to all the houses in which he had lived with her. A few had been pulled down, in others strangers were living, behind pleated net curtains and thick-leafed potted plants on the window sill. After his journey his memories seemed more like fiction than fact, he said, and he felt bitter because the world had changed and had not taken account of his past and his loss.
'So, don't look back!' I say to my dog and I forgot to put on my scarf, after all. Vera is sure to have found out long ago. Sometimes she thinks I deliberately disregard her advice, but that is not so.
All around us, snow falls in thuds from wide-spreading fir branches. When the sun comes out presently, there may well be a thaw. High above us a few seagulls zigzag, but in the wood not a bird stirs. Wherever you go, around here, you smell the sea. A strong smell of algae, seaweed and fish, mingled with the mild, rising scent of millions of brown, decomposing pine needles.
We turn left into Fort Hill Avenue and arrive at Eastern Point Boulevard. Across the bay, the wooden houses of Gloucester on their stone foundations lie scattered against the hillsides, painted in the same cheerful colours as the fishing boats: moss-green, dove-grey, flamingo-pink or brick-red. The two sky-blue, bell-shaped spires of the church high above Main Street seem to keep watch over all those scattered snowy roofs. Between the blue spires stands a life-size statue of the Madonna, holding, instead of the Baby Jesus, a schooner in her left arm. Our Lady of Good Voyage.
Every now and then cars and pick-up trucks drive past slowly. The drivers greet me, although they don't always know me. Fifteen years ago Vera and I came to live here. The house belongs to IMCO. An ex-secretary lived in it before, Joseph Stern. After that it was empty for a year. No one wanted to live so far from work. I didn't mind travelling to Boston every morning on the little train. Maybe the oldest and most ramshackle train in the United States, with such dirty windows to the carriages that you could hardly see that you were practically chuff-chuffing through the back yards of the wooden houses of Salem. In the summer I would watch half-naked toddlers playing in brightly coloured inflatable paddling pools, in winter the garden furniture would be stacked and covered in snow. The wooden seats in the train were hard — there was no first-class carriage — but the journey lasted no longer than half an hour and almost all the time closely followed the coastline of marshy inlets full of grassy tussocks, islets and small bays with marinas, wooden jetties and summer chalets along the banks. It was a friendly journey through a friendly world.
When I retired, IMCO allowed me to stay in the house. It was never really mentioned. I simply continued to pay the rent to a real-estate office in Boston and for the rest nothing changed.
You get cold feet in the snow, no shoes are proof against it. 'Come,' I say to Robert who plods faithfully beside me, 'we'll go a bit faster.'
Many of the clapboard houses around here are empty in the winter. They belong to rich people in Boston and these days even as far as New York, who come here in the summer to go sailing and fishing. The clocks stand still in the empty rooms and only a magazine or a newspaper on a table indicates that people lived here last year.
Denial. Of course! Another word for refusal. Five letters beginning with d. I'd been chewing on that for a whole hour. It is as if the winter air is widening my veins. Maybe that's what it is, hardening of the arteries. You become forgetful. It's part of old age.